Minutes of a meeting and wording of a fundraising notice, 3rd June 1789. The captain of the West India Merchants proposed that they raised a fighting fund (against the abolition of the slave trade) by a voluntary payment of 6d (2 1/2p) per hogshead of sugar etc.

The Society of Merchant Venturers is a Bristol-based organisation, which was formed in 1552 as an elite body of merchants involved in overseas trade. The Society still exists today.